Just to give you an example: I just send an email to my supervisor. Went to bed at 10pm but put the alarm on and going back to bed now.

Am I going crazy?

excellent. Besides, they now think you are hard working late at night, so you caught two birds with one stone..

good for you. The rest of us prefer to be realistic..

Sim, you got my utmost respect for being a PhD student at that young age. I assume you'll be max. 24 once you complete. Experience or not, that's an achievement in itself. Only Gordon Brown was younger when he completed his PhD with 21!

if you have no marketing/business knowledge at all you may consider starting with a basic textbook like Kotler or similar.

my area is not business but I would suggest Journal of Marketing. you can access with your Athens Password and do a keyword search with EBSCO business source premier.

24

Concerning the academic environment, I think 50% of us face this problem. We don't really want to stay in academia after completion but are more or less forced to pretend we are interested in the lifestyle of academics ("publish or perish", "life is research, nothing else" and all that crap).

As you pointed out, many people would like to be in a position like you, so why not just stick with it another 6 months and if you still feel unhappy you can then drop out after one year total and have not wasted too much lifetime. Maybe you'll decide to complete it after that but if not, I think everybody (including me) would understand.

PhD's suck most of the time. The process is crap, many supervisors don't particularly care, isolation and so on. We all hate it most of the time and everybody telling you anything else is either lying to you or masochistic or lying to themselves. There is a real world out there...

This is one of the most bizzare threads I've ever read on this forum..

just to add one point: what I mean by "completion" is actually the time between starting date and successful Viva Voce.

Experience. Observation of other PhD students. Narratives of supervisors etc.

I don't know when you started your PhD, but even if it's going well currently, the writing up process will ultimately take longer than you anticipated. Better be prepared to complete in more than three years. I think the average is three years and 7 months.

I don't want to sound too pessimistic and my original plan was to complete in two years either but it's just not going to happen and you will not find anybody (maybe one or two in the entire UK) who ever completed in 2 years only from their starting date.

To make it short and simple: forget it straight away. It will not happen.

Data collected or not..

Congratulations. I'll try to complete the PhD (still got a substantial number of months/years to go) but I'd rather be snowboarding in the Alps now. It's approaching spring so it's the perfect time for snowboarding-good snow, good sun. I'm really jelaous as I haven't been out there for 5 years. Good luck in the new job.

Unfortunately it is really that bad. I don't want to assume that nobody out there enjoys the research process, but it can be bloody hard sometimes.
Would I start again if I had known it before: NO
Would I recommend anybody starting a PhD: NO
Is it fun at all: NO
Is it easy: NO
Is it comparable to Master/UG studies: NO
Is it worth all the hassle: Don't know yet

BUT and this is a very big but: it's an amazing experience and a personal challenge. The feeling of achievement in the moment of completion must be out of this world. But as I said before, the actual process can be depressing from time to time. There are highs and lows and both can be extreme.

exactly what I thought, Sylvester. Some people are just too lazy to read the entire thread before posting inappropriate superficial comments.